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xf86-video-ati Gets HDMI Audio Support

Phoronix: xf86-video-ati Gets HDMI Audio Support

Ever since the RadeonHD driver switched to using AtomBIOS, there has been little in the way of feature differences between the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd drivers. One of the few differences though is that Novell's RadeonHD driver has had HDMI audio support so that with the R600 GPUs and later, which contain an integrated audio processor, there is audio support for capable HDMI devices when also using a supported version of ALSA...

I had an impression the radeonhd's HDMI implementation was criticized for being in the wrong place. Maybe some more bits more in ALSA, or the ones remaining in display driver side should be moved to kernel mode-setting side?

Anyway, good to see progress there, I believe it is indeed the only feature currently in radeonhd but not in ati, besides that they are different code-bases so one of them works better for some and another for others.

When the developers have philosophical differences, some times it's better to let people go their separate ways and see what they can cook up. Too many cooks in a kitchen can be worse than two sets of cooks taking different approaches to a recipe.

This gets debated a lot, and IIRC, the answer is that the acceleration code is kept common between the two drivers, and that the drivers should eventually "unify" with kernel mode-setting.

I had an impression the radeonhd's HDMI implementation was criticized for being in the wrong place. Maybe some more bits more in ALSA, or the ones remaining in display driver side should be moved to kernel mode-setting side?

The latter afaik. You need to have HDMI audio support in DRM for KMS so this sounds like a short-term improvement.